The growth of the Internet, social networking and mobile technologies has transformed how Americans communicate and exchange information, but Congress has lagged in updating federal privacy laws to safeguard digital communications from inappropriate prying. Late last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee made some serious progress in the right direction.

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Panel Approves a Bill to Safeguard E-Mail (November 30, 2012)

By a voice vote, and with only a single Republican asking to go on record in opposition, the committee approved a measure, proposed by its Democratic chairman, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, that would significantly enhance the privacy protection given to e-mails.

The bill, an amendment to the outdated 1986 law that now governs e-mail access, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, would require law enforcement agents to get a search warrant from a judge in order to obtain e-mail content from a communications service provider that holds private electronic messages, photos and other personal records, like Gmail or Facebook. This means having to show the court there is probable cause to believe that the sought-after records may reveal evidence of wronging.

The approach embraces a sound principle: Private electronic correspondence stored with an Internet company in the “cloud” should receive the same protection afforded letters, photos and other private material stored in a drawer or filing cabinet, or on a computer at home.

Under current law, the warrant requirement is largely limited to e-mails that are less than 180 days old. For other e-mails and digital files, investigators may obtain a court order based on a lower legal standard, showing only that the material is “relevant” to an investigation. In many cases, prosecutors can, without any judicial involvement, issue a subpoena demanding to see messages held by third parties.

Of course, some law enforcement officials oppose tighter restrictions on e-mail access. But nothing in the bill would prevent law enforcement from doing its job or change exceptions in existing law for acting without a warrant in emergencies, when time is of the essence.

The committee measure is limited in scope; most notably, it includes no new protections for location information from cellphones or GPS systems that can be as revealing of a cellphone owner’s associations, activities and personal tastes as listening in on a conversation, for which a warrant is required.

Although the bill is not expected to advance in this lame-duck session, it sets the stage for further debate and action on digital privacy in both the Senate and the House early in the new Congress.

Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.

Not everyone was on board. "This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public," Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.

A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.

MoreA Comparison of the 2008 and 2012 NCTC Guidelines

The NCTC Controversy -- A Timeline

DocumentsNCTC Guidelines – 2012

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.NCTC Guidelines -- 2008

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.Homeland Security Department Email about the NCTC Guidelines

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Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Barack Obama. The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiency—how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be stored—and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.

Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans "reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information" may be permanently retained.

The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, U.S. and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes.

"It's breathtaking" in its scope, said a former senior administration official familiar with the White House debate.

Counterterrorism officials say they will be circumspect with the data. "The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes," said Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the parent agency for the National Counterterrorism Center.

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution says that searches of "persons, houses, papers and effects" shouldn't be conducted without "probable cause" that a crime has been committed. But that doesn't cover records the government creates in the normal course of business with citizens.

Congress specifically sought to prevent government agents from rifling through government files indiscriminately when it passed the Federal Privacy Act in 1974. The act prohibits government agencies from sharing data with each other for purposes that aren't "compatible" with the reason the data were originally collected.

Three Years of WSJ Privacy Insights The Wall Street Journal is conducting a long-running investigation into the profound transformation of personal privacy in America.

Selected findings:

Companies today are increasingly tying people's real-life identities to their online browsing habits.Two students are outed as gay—provoking a crisis within their families—by a Facebook privacy loophole . (10/12/12)Suspicious spouses are taking investigations into their own hands as snooping technologies become cheaper and easier to use. (10/6/12)Americans' license plates are now being tracked not only by the government, but also by repo men who hope to profit from the information. (10/2/12) Google bypassed the privacy settings on millions of Web browsers on Apple iPhones and computers— tracking the online activities of people who intended that kind of monitoring to be blocked. (2/17/12) The government follows the movements of thousands of Americans a year by secretly monitoring their cellphone records . (9/9/11) iPhone and Android apps secretly shared data about their users, a Journal investigation found. (12/10/10) Top apps on Facebook transmit personal identifying details to tracking companies, a Journal investigation found. (10/18/10) One of the fastest growing online businesses is that of spying on Americans as they browse the Web. (6/30/10) Plus, the global surveillance bazaar , a secretive phone-tracking "stingray" and RapLeaf's clever way of figuring out Web surfers' real names .See full privacy coverage .But the Federal Privacy Act allows agencies to exempt themselves from many requirements by placing notices in the Federal Register, the government's daily publication of proposed rules. In practice, these privacy-act notices are rarely contested by government watchdogs or members of the public. "All you have to do is publish a notice in the Federal Register and you can do whatever you want," says Robert Gellman, a privacy consultant who advises agencies on how to comply with the Privacy Act.

As a result, the National Counterterrorism Center program's opponents within the administration—led by Ms. Callahan of Homeland Security—couldn't argue that the program would violate the law. Instead, they were left to question whether the rules were good policy.

Under the new rules issued in March, the National Counterterrorism Center, known as NCTC, can obtain almost any database the government collects that it says is "reasonably believed" to contain "terrorism information." The list could potentially include almost any government database, from financial forms submitted by people seeking federally backed mortgages to the health records of people who sought treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals.

Previous government proposals to scrutinize massive amounts of data about innocent people have caused an uproar. In 2002, the Pentagon's research arm proposed a program called Total Information Awareness that sought to analyze both public and private databases for terror clues. It would have been far broader than the NCTC's current program, examining many nongovernmental pools of data as well.

"If terrorist organizations are going to plan and execute attacks against the United States, their people must engage in transactions and they will leave signatures," the program's promoter, Admiral John Poindexter, said at the time. "We must be able to pick this signal out of the noise."

Adm. Poindexter's plans drew fire from across the political spectrum over the privacy implications of sorting through every single document available about U.S. citizens. Conservative columnist William Safire called the plan a "supersnoop's dream." Liberal columnist Molly Ivins suggested it could be akin to fascism. Congress eventually defunded the program.

The National Counterterrorism Center's ideas faced no similar public resistance. For one thing, the debate happened behind closed doors. In addition, unlike the Pentagon, the NCTC was created in 2004 specifically to use data to connect the dots in the fight against terrorism.

Even after eight years in existence, the agency isn't well known. "We're still a bit of a startup and still having to prove ourselves," said director Matthew Olsen in a rare public appearance this summer at the Aspen Institute, a leadership think tank.

The agency's offices are tucked away in an unmarked building set back from the road in the woodsy suburban neighborhood of McLean, Va. Many employees are on loan from other agencies, and they don't conduct surveillance or gather clues directly. Instead, they analyze data provided by others.

The agency's best-known product is a database called TIDE, which stands for the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. TIDE contains more than 500,000 identities suspected of terror links. Some names are known or suspected terrorists; others are terrorists' friends and families; still more are people with some loose affiliation to a terrorist.

Intelligence officials met at the White House in March to discuss the NCTC proposal with John Brennan, the president's chief counterterrorism adviser.

TIDE files are important because they are used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to compile terrorist "watchlists." These are lists that can block a person from boarding an airplane or obtaining a visa.

The watchlist system failed spectacularly on Christmas Day 2009 when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian man, boarded a flight to Detroit from Amsterdam wearing explosives sewn into his undergarments. He wasn't on the watchlist.

He eventually pleaded guilty to terror-related charges and is imprisoned. His bomb didn't properly detonate.

However, Mr. Abdulmutallab and his underwear did alter U.S. intelligence-gathering. A Senate investigation revealed that NCTC had received information about him but had failed to query other government databases about him. In a scathing finding, the Senate report said, "the NCTC was not organized adequately to fulfill its missions."

"This was not a failure to collect or share intelligence," said John Brennan, the president's chief counterterrorism adviser, at a White House press conference in January 2010. "It was a failure to connect and integrate and understand the intelligence we had."

As result, Mr. Obama demanded a watchlist overhaul. Agencies were ordered to send all their leads to NCTC, and NCTC was ordered to "pursue thoroughly and exhaustively terrorism threat threads." Quickly, NCTC was flooded with terror tips—each of which it was obligated to "exhaustively" pursue. By May 2010 there was a huge backlog, according a report by the Government Accountability Office.

Legal obstacles emerged. NCTC analysts were permitted to query federal-agency databases only for "terrorism datapoints," say, one specific person's name, or the passengers on one particular flight. They couldn't look through the databases trolling for general "patterns." And, if they wanted to copy entire data sets, they were required to remove information about innocent U.S. people "upon discovery."

But they didn't always know who was innocent. A person might seem innocent today, until new details emerge tomorrow.

"What we learned from Christmas Day"—from the failed underwear bomb—was that some information "might seem more relevant later," says Mr. Joel, the national intelligence agency's civil liberties officer. "We realized we needed it to be retained longer."

Late last year, for instance, NCTC obtained an entire database from Homeland Security for analysis, according to a person familiar with the transaction. Homeland Security provided the disks on the condition that NCTC would remove all innocent U.S. person data after 30 days.

After 30 days, a Homeland Security team visited and found that the data hadn't yet been removed. In fact, NCTC hadn't even finished uploading the files to its own computers, that person said. It can take weeks simply to upload and organize the mammoth data sets.

Homeland Security granted a 30-day extension. That deadline was missed, too. So Homeland Security revoked NCTC's access to the data.

To fix problems like these that had cropped up since the Abdulmutallab incident, NCTC proposed the major expansion of its powers that would ultimately get debated at the March meeting in the White House. It moved to ditch the requirement that it discard the innocent-person data. And it asked for broader authority to troll for patterns in the data.

As early as February 2011, NCTC's proposal was raising concerns at the privacy offices of both Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, according to emails reviewed by the Journal.

Privacy offices are a relatively new phenomenon in the intelligence community. Most were created at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. Privacy officers are often in the uncomfortable position of identifying obstacles to plans proposed by their superiors.

At the Department of Justice, Chief Privacy Officer Nancy Libin raised concerns about whether the guidelines could unfairly target innocent people, these people said. Some research suggests that, statistically speaking, there are too few terror attacks for predictive patterns to emerge. The risk, then, is that innocent behavior gets misunderstood—say, a man buying chemicals (for a child's science fair) and a timer (for the sprinkler) sets off false alarms.

An August government report indicates that, as of last year, NCTC wasn't doing predictive pattern-matching.

The internal debate was more heated at Homeland Security. Ms. Callahan and colleague Margo Schlanger, who headed the 100-person Homeland Security office for civil rights and civil liberties, were concerned about the implications of turning over vast troves of data to the counterterrorism center, these people said.

They and Ms. Libin at the Justice Department argued that the failure to catch Mr. Abdulmutallab wasn't caused by the lack of a suspect—he had already been flagged—but by a failure to investigate him fully. So amassing more data about innocent people wasn't necessarily the right solution.

The most sensitive Homeland Security data trove at stake was the Advanced Passenger Information System. It contains the name, gender, birth date and travel information for every airline passenger entering the U.S.

Mary Ellen Callahan, then-chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security: 'This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public.'

Previously, Homeland Security had pledged to keep passenger data only for 12 months. But NCTC was proposing to copy and keep it for up to five years. Ms. Callahan argued this would break promises the agency had made to the public about its use of personal data, these people said.

Discussions sometimes got testy, according to emails reviewed by the Journal. In one case, Ms. Callahan sent an email complaining that "examples" provided to her by an unnamed intelligence official were "complete non-sequiturs" and "non-responsive."

In May 2011, Ms. Callahan and Ms. Schlanger raised their concerns with the chief of their agency, Janet Napolitano. They fired off a memo under the longwinded title, "How Best to Express the Department's Privacy and Civil Liberties Concerns over Draft Guidelines Proposed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center," according to an email obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The contents of the memo, which appears to run several pages, were redacted.

The two also kept pushing the NCTC officials to justify why they couldn't search for terrorism clues less invasively, these people said. "I'm not sure I'm totally prepared with the firestorm we're about to create," Ms. Schlanger emailed Ms. Callahan in November, referring to the fact that the two wanted more privacy protections. Ms. Schlanger returned to her faculty position at the University of Michigan Law School soon after but remains an adviser to Homeland Security.

To resolve the issue, Homeland Security's deputy secretary, Jane Holl Lute, requested the March meeting at the White House. The second in command from Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the FBI, NCTC and the office of the director of national intelligence sat at the small conference table. Normal protocol for such meeting is for staffers such as Ms. Callahan to sit against the walls of the room and keep silent.

By this point, Ms. Libin's concern that innocent people could be inadvertently targeted had been largely overruled at the Department of Justice, these people said. Colleagues there were more concerned about missing the next terrorist threat.

That left Ms. Callahan as the most prominent opponent of the proposed changes. In an unusual move, Ms. Lute asked Ms. Callahan to speak about Homeland Security's privacy concerns. Ms. Callahan argued that the rules would constitute a "sea change" because, whenever citizens interact with the government, the first question asked will be, are they a terrorist?

Mr. Brennan considered the arguments. And within a few days, the attorney general, Eric Holder, had signed the new guidelines. The Justice Department declined to comment about the debate over the guidelines.

Under the new rules, every federal agency must negotiate terms under which it would hand over databases to NCTC. This year, Ms. Callahan left Homeland Security for private practice, and Ms. Libin left the Justice Department to join a private firm.

Homeland Security is currently working out the details to give the NCTC three data sets—the airline-passenger database known as APIS; another airline-passenger database containing information about non-U.S. citizen visitors to the U.S.; and a database about people seeking refugee asylum. It previously agreed to share databases containing information about foreign-exchange students and visa applications.

Once the terms are set, Homeland Security is likely to post a notice in the Federal Register. The public can submit comments to the Federal Register about proposed changes, although Homeland Security isn't required to make changes based on the comments.

He has made it clear he certainly expects it to be done by year's end.

I don't want FISA reauthorized before Christmas. I don't want it reauthorized before the New Year.

I don't want FISA reauthorized-period.

If Reid intends on making sure government cronies can spy on private citizens without a warrant, I am intent on introducing the "Fourth Amendment Protection Act," which states: The Fourth Amendment right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures is violated when the government acquires information voluntarily relinquished by a person to another party for a limited business purpose without the express informed consent of the person to the specific request by the government or a Warrant, upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It is amazing that I even have to introduce this as an amendment because it already is an amendment-to the Constitution of the United States.

And make no mistake-the Fourth Amendment is every bit as important to preserving our freedoms as the entire Bill of Rights.

I hope you'll join me in fighting Harry Reid and Barack Obama to protect our right to privacy.

We can't have government stepping into every aspect of our private lives without some level of judicial restraint.

This has been a core principle of American freedom and individual rights for as long as there has been an America.

It is a basic value that has long defined who we are as a nation and has separated us from less free nations.

Will you join me in helping to fight FISA reauthorization?

Neither Senator Reid nor anyone else has the right to take away the constitutional protections that have always been our birthright.

The current FISA Amendment gives a blank check to government to spy on any American, at any time and for any reason.

It goes against everything this country stands for.

It goes against every principle we fought a revolution for.

It goes against the Constitution every one of my Senate colleagues took an oath to protect.

For freedom's sake, FISA cannot stand. It should not survive.

I hope you will join me in fighting to defeat it.

In Liberty,

Senator Rand Paul

P.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is looking to ram through FISA Reauthorization before the end of the year.

You and I can't allow the trampling of our Fourth Amendment rights to continue!

I have come to like Rand Paul more and more over time, but these last two issues, NDAA and FISA opposition, are not his best ones IMHO.

We need plenty of protections for our civil liberties, but I don't believe that anti-terror agents hunting down clues of terrorist acts in planning too zealously is among the top 100 problems in this country.

Sen. Paul: "Would you want government agents listening to your phone calls? Looking at your email? Spying on your online activity? Chances are they have, and you didn't even know it. "

Most of the time I don't want government in my life at all, but the reality is that running down clues after a terrorist attack is too late, especially in this day of suicide attacks.

The unmanned aircraft that most people associate with hunting terrorists and striking targets in Pakistan are on the brink of evolving into a big domestic industry. It is not a question of whether drones will appear in the skies above the United States but how soon.

Congress has ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to quickly select six domestic sites to test the safety of drones, which can vary in size from remote-controlled planes as big as jetliners to camera-toting hoverers called Nano Hummingbirds that weigh 19 grams.

The drone go-ahead, signed in February by President Obama in the F.A.A. reauthorization law, envisions a $5 billion-plus industry of camera drones being used for all sorts of purposes from real estate advertising to crop dusting to environmental monitoring and police work.

Responding to growing concern as the public discovers drones are on the horizon, the agency recently and quite sensibly added the issue of citizens’ privacy to its agenda. Setting regulations under the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unlawful search is of the utmost importance. But since the F.A.A.’s primary mission is safety, Congress should take the matter in hand by writing privacy safeguards for the booming drone industry.

The anticipated market includes tens of thousands of police, fire and other government agencies able to afford drones lighter than traditional aircraft and costing as little as $300. Several surveillance drones are already used for border patrol, and the F.A.A. has allowed a few police departments to experiment narrowly, as in a ceiling of 400 feet for surveillance flights over the Everglades by the Miami Police Department.

Privacy worries in California prompted Alameda County officials to postpone drone plans for further study. The local sheriff insisted that what he had in mind was disaster response, not random snooping, but the local American Civil Liberties Union office claimed the plan would have permitted extensive intelligence gathering.

The A.C.L.U.’s national office is warning that while drones could have many benefits like search-and-rescue work and tracking dangerous criminal situations, the law’s lack of privacy mandates will inevitably invite “pervasive surveillance” of the public.

The idea of watchful drones buzzing overhead like Orwellian gnats may seem far-fetched to some. But Congress, in its enthusiasm for a new industry, should guarantee the strongest protection of privacy under what promises to be a galaxy of new eyes in the sky.

WikiLeaks: Americans Being Monitored by Top Secret Surveillance System ‘TrapWire’

(VALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images)WikiLeaks documents reportedly reveal the existence of a secret surveillance program “more accurate than modern facial recognition technology,” which is being utilized by a clandestine organization made up of a number of former members of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the Pentagon.The documents, comprised of emails hacked by Anonymous, identify the program as “TrapWire,” and this could be the biggest of all previous leaks if the documents turn out to contain accurate information. WikiLeaks began releasing the emails hacked from the geopolitical intelligence company Stratfor earlier this year.“Hacktivists” with the group Anonymous took credit for hacking Stratfor on Dec. 24, 2011 and said they had collected more than five million emails from within the organization, some of which show a collaboration between Stratfor and the TrapWire creators at Abraxas, a company based in northern Virginia that is staffed with some of the most elite members of America’s intelligence community.As much as we’d prefer not to cite the Russian-state controlled media network RT, there are no other mainstream media outlets currently covering the issue. This how RT described TrapWire based on information found in WikiLeaks documents:Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it’s the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation’s ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.

The details on Abraxas and, to an even greater extent TrapWire, are scarce, however, and not without reason. For a program touted as a tool to thwart terrorism and monitor activity meant to be under wraps, its understandable that Abraxas would want the program’s public presence to be relatively limited. But thanks to last year’s hack of the Strategic Forecasting intelligence agency, or Stratfor, all of that is quickly changing.It may sound like something right out of a spy novel, but according to the documents, TrapWire has access to all the cameras popping up on every street corner and various other technologies and they are using that data to monitor you and anyone else they think needs to be watched via facial recognition. Talk about Big Brother.

NYPD's new super computer system is a joint venture between the city and Microsoft (Source: New York Daily News/Brian Smith)It sounds eerily similar to a program unveiled in New York City earlier this month called the “Domain Awareness System,” created out of a partnership with Microsoft.According to the city’s statement, the DAS “aggregates and analyzes existing public safety data streams in real time, providing NYPD investigators and analysts with a comprehensive view of potential threats and criminal activity.”In other words, the system will link the city’s roughly 3,000 CCTV cameras, license plate readers, environmental sensors and other law enforcement databases so they can “protect” American citizens. There’s no way privacy issues could arise out of such a program.That begs the question: If New York City is being monitored by such an invasive surveillance system, is it really that far fetched that the rest of the United States may be as well?More from RT on the TrapWire system:According to a press release (pdf) dated June 6, 2012, TrapWire is “designed to provide a simple yet powerful means of collecting and recording suspicious activity reports.” A system of interconnected nodes spot anything considered suspect and then input it into the system to be “analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning.”In a 2009 email included in the Anonymous leak, Stratfor Vice President for Intelligence Fred Burton is alleged to write,“TrapWire is a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance.” Burton formerly served with the US Diplomatic Security Service, and Abraxas’ staff includes other security experts with experience in and out of the Armed Forces.What is believed to be a partnering agreement included in the Stratfor files from August 13, 2009 indicates that they signed a contract with Abraxas to provide them with analysis and reports of their TrapWire system (pdf).(H/T:: Business Insider)

I know Trapwire well, I recommended it years ago to a friend that was in charge of security for a big city transit system. He decided not to use it. The breathless way it's described above makes it sound much more exciting than it is.

Trapwire parses through the footage of your video camera system looking for atypical behavior patterns. That might flag someone doing preoperational surveillance that you can then investigate and hopefully prevent a mass casualty attack.

In the Privacy Wars, It's iSpy vs. gSpy Big Brother is watching us. But we are watching backAndy Kessler

Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, thinks she's got problems? Last week she complained that a family photo posted to Facebook had been circulated on Twitter without her authorization. Well, over a few hours around town that day I counted 57 cameras—at traffic lights, various stores and the bank—and my phone told me I switched between eight different cellphone towers. We are all being watched, whether we like it or not.

So who's winning? It is a battle between you and the government—like Mad Magazine's Spy vs. Spy comic, but it's gSpy vs. iSpy.

There are thousands of toll booths at bridges and turnpikes across America recording your license plate. There are 4,214 red-light cameras and 761 speed-trap cameras around the country. Add 494,151 cell towers and 400,000 ATMs that record video of your transactions. New York City alone has 2,400 official surveillance cameras and recently hired Microsoft to monitor real-time feeds as part of the Orwellian-named Domain Awareness System. And that is nothing compared with England, where over four million surveillance cameras record the average Londoner 300 times a day.

Popular Mechanics magazine estimates that there are some 30 million commercial surveillance cameras in the U.S. logging billions of hours of video a week. I guarantee that you're in hundreds if not thousands of these. In the year 1984, we only had lame amber-screened PCs running Lotus 123. Now, 64 years after George Orwell sent "1984" to his publisher, we have cheap video cams and wireless links and terabyte drives and Big Brother is finally watching.

So gSpy is winning, right?

Not so fast. We are watching back. I know the precise number of red-light cameras because a website (poi-factory.com) crowdsources their locations and updates them daily for download to GPS devices. And 30 million surveillance cameras are a pittance compared with the 327 million cellphones in use across America, almost all of them with video cameras built in.

How do you think the "Don't tase me, bro" guy protesting a 2007 speech by John Kerry ever got famous? Last year, when cops at the University of California at Davis were caught on video pepper-spraying protesters, they had to pay $30,000 each to 21 students to settle. A man arrested for blocking traffic at an Occupy Wall Street protest (who was there to defend police tactics, oddly) was acquitted when smartphone photos and video showed protesters on the sidewalk, not the street. Six members of the 2004 St. John's basketball team had rape charges against them dropped when a video of the accuser's extortion demands was recorded on a player's cellphone.

Zapruder, Rodney King, the young Iranian Neda Agha-Soltan's death by gunshot after her country's rigged 2009 election. In America and increasingly across the world, iSpies are watching, too.

Both sides are getting more sophisticated. Snowboarders mount GoPro Hero cameras to their helmets to record up to eight hours of their exploits. So-called lifeloggers pin small, $199 "Memoto" cameras to their shirts and snap a photo every 30 seconds. With cheaper data storage, it is easy to envision iSpies logging audio, GPS and eventually video of our lives.

But gSpy is going further. Already a third of large U.S. police forces equip patrol cars with automatic license plate-readers that can check 1,000 plates per hour looking for scofflaws. Better pay those parking tickets because this system sure beats a broken tail light as an excuse to pull you over. U.S. Border Patrol already uses iris-recognition technology, with facial-recognition in the works, if not already deployed. How long until police identify 1,000 faces per hour walking around the streets of New York?

In September, Facebook turned off its facial-recognition technology world-wide after complaints from Ireland's Data Protection Commission. I hope they turn it back on, as it is one of the few iSpy tools ahead of gSpy deployment.

The government has easy access to our tax information, stock trades, phone bills, medical records and credit-card spending, and it is just getting started. In Bluffdale, Utah, according to Wired magazine, the National Security Agency is building a $2 billion, one-million-square-foot facility with the capacity to consume $40 million of electricity a year, rivaling Google's biggest data centers.

Some estimate the facility will be capable of storing five zettabytes of data. It goes tera, peta, exa, then zetta—so that's like five billion terabyte drives, or more than enough to store every email, cellphone call, Google search and surveillance-camera video for a long time to come. Companies like Palantir Technologies (co-founded by early Facebook investor Peter Thiel) exist to help the government find terrorists and Wall Street firms find financial fraud.

As with all technology, these tools will eventually be available to the public. Internet users created and stored 2.8 zettabytes in 2012. Facebook has a billion users. There are over 425 million Gmail accounts, which for most of us are personal records databases. But they're vulnerable. We know from the takedown of former Gen. David Petraeus that some smart legwork by the FBI (in this case matching hotel Wi-Fi tags and the travel schedule of biographer Paula Broadwell) can open up that database to prying eyes. Google has accused China of cracking into Gmail accounts.

Google gets over 15,000 criminal investigation requests from the U.S. government each year, and the company says it complies 90% of the time. The Senate last week had a chance to block the feds from being able to read any domestic emails without a warrant—which would put some restraint on gSpy—but lawmakers passed it up. Google's Eric Schmidt said in 2009, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Thanks, Eric.

From governments to individuals, the amount of information captured and stored is growing exponentially. Like it or not, a truism of digital technology is that if information is stored, it will get out. Mr. Schmidt is right. It doesn't matter whether an iSpy friend of Randi Zuckerberg tweets it or a future WikiLeaks pulls it out of the data center at Bluffdale and posts it for all to view. Gen. Petraeus knows it. Politicians yapping about "clinging to guns" or "the 47%" know it. Information wants to be free and will be. Plan for it. I'm paying my parking tickets this week.

Stealth Wear: New Counter-Surveillance Clothing Makes You Invisible to Drones

Mac Slavo January 11th, 2013SHTFplan.com

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Read by 31,131 people

In early 2012 the U.S. Congress authorized the FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act. Within this bill is a provision calling for the deployment of some 30,000 robotic drones over the skies of America by 2015, arguably the boldest overt domestic surveillance initiative to have ever been introduced in the land of the free. With an average of some 600 drones allocated per state, this future network of highly advanced surveillance systems promises to give law enforcement, military and intelligence assets unprecedented video and audio access into the lives of every single American.

Privacy advocates are justifiably outraged.

But whenever government attempts to institute a ban on contraband items, or pass draconian laws, or introduce new tracking and surveillance methods, rebellious elements within the target populace rapidly develop counter-strategies and technologies to marginalize the threat.

Oftentimes, billion dollar government initiatives and development projects are rendered almost useless by low-tech strategies and designs.

Artist and fashion designer Adam Harvey, who objects to the authoritarian nature of the global surveillance state, has done just that.

In an effort to counter the high-tech integrated drone surveillance systems soon to be fused into intelligence networks across the country, Harvey and a group of partners have developed a line of clothing dubbed Stealth Wear.

Making its debut on January 17th, the Stealth Wear line will include hoodies, scarves, hats, and t-shirts that will make the wearer invisible to thermal imaging cameras widely used throughout the unmanned aerial vehicle community.

The idea is that the material blocks heat signatures, captured using infrared sensors, which give people away to surveillance helicopters or drones from the skies above. [link]

The flagship Stealth Wear line will include:

■The anti-drone hoodie and anti-drone scarf: Garments designed to thwart thermal imaging, a technology used widely by UAVs. ■The XX-shirt: A x-ray shielding print in the shape of a heart, that protects your heart from x-ray radiation ■And the Off Pocket: An anti-phone accessory that allows you to instantly zero out your phone’s signal

The genetic data posted online seemed perfectly anonymous — strings of billions of DNA letters from more than 1,000 people. But all it took was some clever sleuthing on the Web for a genetics researcher to identify five people he randomly selected from the study group. Not only that, he found their entire families, even though the relatives had no part in the study — identifying nearly 50 people.

A study published in Science identified people from online searches of strings of DNA letters, and age and a state.

The researcher did not reveal the names of the people he found, but the exercise, published Thursday in the journal Science, illustrates the difficulty of protecting the privacy of volunteers involved in medical research when the genetic information they provide needs to be public so scientists can use it.

Other reports have identified people whose genetic data was online, but none had done so using such limited information: the long strings of DNA letters, an age and, because the study focused on only American subjects, a state.

“I’ve been worried about this for a long time,” said Barbara Koenig, a researcher at the University of California in San Francisco who studies issues involving genetic data. “We always should be operating on the assumption that this is possible.”

The data are from an international study, the 1000 Genomes Project, that is collecting genetic information from people around the world and posting it online so researchers can use it freely. It also includes the ages of participants and the regions where they live. That information, a genealogy Web site and Google searches were sufficient to find complete family trees. While the methods for extracting relevant genetic data from the raw genetic sequence files were specialized enough to be beyond the scope of most laypeople, no one expected it to be so easy to zoom in on individuals.

“We are in what I call an awareness moment,” said Eric D. Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

There is no easy answer about what to do to protect the privacy of study subjects. Subjects might be made more aware that they could be identified by their DNA sequences. More data could be locked behind security walls, or severe penalties could be instituted for those who invade the privacy of subjects.

“We don’t have any claim to have the answer,” Dr. Green said. And opinions about just what should be done vary greatly among experts.

But after seeing how easy it was to find the individuals and their extended families, the N.I.H. removed people’s ages from the public database, making it more difficult to identify them.

But Dr. Jeffrey R. Botkin, associate vice president for research integrity at the University of Utah, which collected the genetic information of some research participants whose identities were breached, cautioned about overreacting. Genetic data from hundreds of thousands of people have been freely available online, he said, yet there has not been a single report of someone being illicitly identified. He added that “it is hard to imagine what would motivate anyone to undertake this sort of privacy attack in the real world.” But he said he had serious concerns about publishing a formula to breach subjects’ privacy. By publishing, he said, the investigators “exacerbate the very risks they are concerned about.”

The project was the inspiration of Yaniv Erlich, a human genetics researcher at the Whitehead Institute, which is affiliated with M.I.T. He stresses that he is a strong advocate of data sharing and that he would hate to see genomic data locked up. But when his lab developed a new technique, he realized he had the tools to probe a DNA database. And he could not resist trying.

The tool allowed him to quickly find a type of DNA pattern that looks like stutters among billions of chemical letters in human DNA. Those little stutters — short tandem repeats — are inherited. Genealogy Web sites use repeats on the Y chromosome, the one unique to men, to identify men by their surnames, an indicator of ancestry. Any man can submit the short tandem repeats on his Y chromosome and find the surname of men with the same DNA pattern. The sites enable men to find their ancestors and relatives.

So, Dr. Erlich asked, could he take a man’s entire DNA sequence, pick out the short tandem repeats on his Y chromosome, search a genealogy site, discover the man’s surname and then fully identify the man?

He tested it with the genome of Craig Venter, a DNA sequencing pioneer who posted his own DNA sequence on the Web. He knew Dr. Venter’s age and the state where he lives. Bingo: two men popped up in the database. One was Craig Venter.

“Out of 300 million people in the United States, we got it down to two people,” Dr. Erlich said. ===========

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He and his colleagues calculated they would be able to identify, from just their DNA sequences, the last names of approximately 12 percent of middle class and wealthier white men — the population that tends to submit DNA data to recreational sites like the genealogical ones. Then by combining the men’s last names with their ages and the states where they lived, the researchers should be able to narrow their search to just a few likely individuals.

Now for the big test. On the Web and publicly available are DNA sequences from subjects in the 1000 Genomes Project. People’s ages were included and all the Americans lived in Utah, so the researchers knew their state.

Dr. Erlich began with one man from the database. He got the Y chromosome’s short tandem repeats and then went to genealogy databases and searched for men with those same repeats. He got surnames of the paternal and maternal grandfather. Then he did a Google search for those people and found an obituary. That gave him the family tree.

“Now I knew the whole family,” Dr. Erlich said. And it was so simple, so fast.

“I said, ‘Come on, that can’t be true.’” So he probed and searched and checked again and again.

“Oh my God, we really did this,” Dr. Erlich said. “I had to digest it. We had so much information.”

He and his colleagues went on to get detailed family trees for other subjects and then visited Dr. Green and his colleagues at the N.I.H. to tell them what they had done.

They were referred to Amy L. McGuire, a lawyer and ethicist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She, like others, called for more public discussion of the situation.

“To have the illusion you can fully protect privacy or make data anonymous is no longer a sustainable position,” Dr. McGuire said.

When the subjects in the 1000 Genomes Project agreed to participate and provide DNA, they signed a form saying that the researchers could not guarantee their privacy. But, at the time, it seemed like so much boilerplate. The risk, Dr. Green said, seemed “remote.”

“I don’t know that anyone anticipated that someone would go and actually figure out who some of those people were,” Dr. McGuire said.

Not sure of your point here GM. Is it that it is OK to x-ray people randomly because the technology can be defeated by counter measures?

It doesn't appear that x-rays are an element of this technology. No, I was pointing out how this is costly and probably useless vaporware. The bad guys will adapt. I expect that clothing that defeats this technology will be the next hiphop fashion trend, should it actually see actual use on the streets of NYC.

The federal courts are bearing down on the New York City Police Department’s constitutionally suspect stop-and-frisk program, under which hundreds of thousands of citizens are stopped on the streets each year, often illegally and for no discernible reason. Earlier this month, the federal judge who is presiding over three lawsuits that challenge different parts of the program issued her harshest ruling yet, putting the city on notice that some aspects of stop and frisk are clearly unconstitutional.

The ruling, by Judge Shira Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan, came in the case of Ligon v. the City of New York. The case was brought on behalf of people who say they were illegally stopped, given tickets or arrested on trespassing charges in private apartment buildings, some of them in buildings where they lived.

The judge excoriated the city for flagrant indifference to the Fourth Amendment. The amendment has been interpreted by the courts to mean that police officers can legally stop and detain a person only when they have a reasonable suspicion that the person is committing, has committed or is about to commit a crime.

The department’s patently illegal strategy, the judge said, encouraged officers to “stop and question first, develop reasonable suspicion later.” The ruling focuses on detentions that occurred as people were entering or leaving one of many residential buildings in the Bronx whose managers had simply asked the department to patrol the area and arrest trespassers. The Trespass Affidavit Program, or TAP, has thus not only led to unjustified detentions but has also placed untold numbers people at risk of detention merely for entering their own homes or visiting friends and relatives. Their experiences, as described in the ruling, makes perfectly clear why the largely minority citizens targeted and victimized by the program come away feeling angry and ill used.

Describing the typical, humiliating sequence of events, the judge wrote: “The police suddenly materialize, stop the person, demand identification, and question the person about where he or she is coming from and what he or she is doing.” She added that “attempts at explanation are met with hostility; especially if the person is a young black man, he is frisked, which often involves an invasive search of his pockets; in some cases the officers then detain the person in a police van,” where he or she is grilled about drugs or weapons. In some cases, the stop escalates into an arrest, the judge noted, with the person fingerprinted and held overnight. Even if the charges are quickly dropped, the arrest can follow the person for years.

The judge tore into the city for persisting in this behavior even after prosecutors and department lawyers had become aware that unlawful stops were occurring. In 2011, for example, the Bronx prosecutor’s office become so concerned about the legality of stops made outside the TAP buildings that it routinely declined to prosecute cases based on them.

Judge Scheindlin ordered the Police Department to immediately cease trespass stops outside TAP buildings unless officers have the reasonable suspicion required by law, though she has issued a temporary stay. She has also scheduled a remedy hearing in March, at which time she could require the city to take various remedial steps, including a formal written policy explaining the circumstances under which officers can legally stop people on suspicion of trespass.

There are other procedures that can be followed without threatening law enforcement. Instead of defending the indefensible, the city should finally bring the stop-and-frisk program into line with the law.

New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has made it clear. Stop and Frisk, as it is commonly known, saves lives. Some activists thoroughly oppose the program. They believe that Stop and Frisk is nothing more than a violation of one’s personal rights in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Activist also suggests that Stop and Frisk focuses on minorities. This conflict cuts like a knife into the soul of police professionalism.

The very people officers actively work to protect from harm are criticizing the police for following guidelines established by the Terry v Ohio (1968) ruling of the United States Supreme Court. As most readers know, this landmark decision introduced the “reasonable suspicion” rule for frisking a detained person to determine if he or she is armed (for the protection of the officer) or about to commit a criminal act (for the protection of the public).

I too recognize one’s personal rights must not be violated under the law. I also recognize when a police officer suspects criminality is afoot before, during, or after what appears to be a penal law misdemeanor or any felony, a police officer has the authority and duty to stop an individual(s) based solely on reasonable suspicion as directed by the Terry doctrine. As all LEOs know, Stop and Frisk is only permissible within an officer’s geographical area of employment, a protection for citizens not often reviewed in discussions of this issue.

The landmark case of Terry v Ohio serves as the Bright Line rule which guides officers in enforcing the well-being of society without violating one’s constitutional rights. This is a weighty responsibility. Taking appropriate and legal action is a challenge for LEOs. Society has made harsh judgments of law enforcement. Many have predetermined that actions taken law enforcement are illegal, prejudicial, and without merit. Nothing can be further from the truth.

This is the challenge NYPD faces. If NYPD’s mission to protect society is circumvented, then chaos will ensue. Political and personal interests must not override the commitment and responsibility of the police to all New York City residents. Other complaints typically generated are after a person is stopped pursuant to the Terry Doctrine, there is no further action taken by the police. People have indicated they were neither issued a citation nor placed under arrest. A police officer should not be criticized. The officer is to be complimented for following the guidelines set by the Terry Doctrine.

Stop and Frisk may be initiated based simply on mere reasonable suspicion. This is the lowest level of proof required by law. Since the practice is based only on suspicions, a person may be stopped, but not arrested unless probable cause for arrest is established.

In New York, a person may be stopped and subsequently frisked if an officer has reasonable suspicion to believe an individual is armed and a danger to the officer. Upon completing the frisk, the subject will be subject to arrest if the person is illegally carrying a firearm. On the other hand, if an individual is in possession of a firearm and found not to be dangerous and legally carrying, police will return the firearm.

The term Stop and Frisk is misleading. Stop and Frisk is not the proper term when referring to the Terry Doctrine. The term itself suggests wrongdoing. The proper terminology is Stop, Question, and Possibly Frisk. Does this mean stopping and frisking an individual immediately is improper or illegal? The answer is no! An immediate frisk has to do with the guidelines of the Terry Doctrine. An officer may conduct an immediate frisk if the officer reasonably suspects the person is armed and a threat.

The action taken by the police is Stop, Question, and possibly Frisk. The action taken by the police is determined by the circumstances present along with the actions of the person stopped based on reasonable suspicion. A Stop, Question, and Frisk is not prejudicial. I took the time to visit the NYPD website. I found the Stop, Question, and Possibly Frisk posted. There is no reference to Stop and Frisk as a policy. A policy is created and enforced by a procedure. The policy and procedure in place are for the betterment of society, all individuals, and law enforcement personnel.

In Terry v Ohio Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the opinion of the Court. The Chief Justice stated that the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure is applicable to the states pursuant to the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.”

Commissioner Kelly’s firm stance regarding Stop and Frisk is a demonstration of the true value of professional decision making compared to one’s idealistic opinion. Stop and Frisk is being revisited. The NYPD’s First Quarter Stop and Frisk Report for 2012 (January – March) compared to the Second Quarter Report (April – June) indicates Stop and Frisk declined by 34% and major crimes spiked by 12%. According to the New York Post, there were 27,832 major crimes in the second quarter, up from 24,751,

During the significant drop of Stop and Frisks initiated in the Second Quarter it would be prudent to remember the words spoken by the Police Commissioner: “Stop and Frisks save lives.” The drop in Stop and Frisks also occurred following public protests against the police. This decision also followed an ACLU June announcement of a free phone application for all New Yorkers to use at no expense. This was done to enable New Yorkers to record police completing a Stop and Frisk. The recording is then to be forwarded directly to the ACLU.

During the Third Quarter, a four-year-old African-American child was shot and killed in a Bronx playground. Three people are in custody. Police believe the incident is gang related. The child was killed in crossfire. In Brooklyn, a two year old girl was shot in her leg as a drive-by shooting occurred. Five other people were wounded as well. One of these victims is the father of the girl. He was shot as he used himself as a shield to protect his daughter.

Crime tends to be intra-racial. If a high-crime area has a high concentration of African-Americans, it is reasonable to believe that a higher percentage of African-Americans are stopped pursuant to a Stop, Question, and Frisk. The likelihood is the law-abiding African-Americans living and working in that community will be protected from wrongdoing, rather than have their constitutional rights abrogated.

Many officers are concerned about the situation they have now found themselves to be in. Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it!

Hopefully, the Third Quarter will improve.

Jim Gaffney, MPA is LET’s risk management /police administration contributor. He has served with a metro-New York police department for over 25 years in varying capacities, including patrol officer, sergeant, lieutenant, and executive officer. He is a member of ILEETA, IACP, and the IACSP. Jim received the Medal of Honor upon graduating from Iona College. He then completed a two year study evaluating the Victim-Offender Overlap. Jim graduated Magna Cum Laude upon receiving his Master of Science in Public Administration. He mentors the next generation of LEOs by teaching university-level criminal justice courses as an adjunct professor in the New York City area.

A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.

A video obtained by the Guardian reveals how an "extreme-scale analytics" system created by Raytheon, the world's fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

Raytheon says it has not sold the software - named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology - to any clients. But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing "trillions of entities" from cyberspace.

Schumacher’s drone concern is twofold. First, he recognizes that drones are big business, as can be observed by the research and development of weaponized and surveillance drone technology for American military use overseas. With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq winding down, Schumacher doesn’t foresee the drones or their manufacturers and lobbyists disappearing. They will simply start pitching their drones to American law enforcement agencies who, Schumacher says, will be unable to resist the new technology.

His second concern is that once drones are in the hands of American police, they will be used for surveillance in ways that will infringe upon the privacy of citizens.

That is kind of the question, I think. And, I don't think it applies universally. Observation with the naked eye, or even binoculars, by a pilot or spotter is very different than heat sensors or cameras that can see for miles. And then there is issue of flight time.

And comprehensiveness. We are rapidly approaching omnipresent surveillance permanently recorded. With an increasingingly lawless government with a geometrically expanding base of laws and regulations beyond the ability of mere mortals to track, any one who fights the power, even within the rules of the game as conceived by our Consitutition, will be subject to the politics of personal destruction and financial attrition via legal defense costs that used to be aimed only at big players at the top of the game. The net tendency will be for an increasing docile flock of sheep keeping its collective head down instead of a free people.

Indeed it is not even clear to me that drones will need pilots. If not yet, soon enough they can be sent up there on auto-pilot recording everybody everywhere all the time. Also, they are getting smaller and smaller and quieter and quieter, with some now the size of insects , , , that transmit video and audio.

All of this this profoundly violates my sense of what free society is.

"With Department of Homeland Security officials watching, the small group of techies from the University of Texas at Austin's Radionavigation Laboratory showed the security experts how to mimic a dummy GPS controller, aim it at the drone and start controlling it. It worked within minutes, and the students had control of the unmanned aircraft."

For a very bright man, you are rather obtuse on this subject. The point is that surveillance is in the process of becoming omnispresent: everywhere, all the time, of everyone, recorded for all posterity.